Experience currently with learning Japanese

Most of these last few days I have finally decided to give myself a gentle, but strong push to get started learning Japanese. The first step is learning the alphabet and characters. My friend has directed me to many valuable websites and also videos that can help me get started. So far it is going well.

Wednesday she presented to me the chart of Hiragana and Katakana and instantly I was excited. However I was also nervous. How will I start? Will I find it harder than I expected? The truth was obvious once I placed pen to paper. I printed out the stroke order sheets, and their corresponding romaji sheet. When the time was right and a quiet place was found, I was able to sit and see what I could do. I started well at first, but like with learning Vietnamese, my hand would lose it's control and the characters became bigger, too open, and haphazard. I was a little disappointed and also happy that it wasn't as difficult to feel the rhythm as I wrote.

Hiragana I discovered was a lot more harder to control the movement of my hand. My hands were shifting to art mode, meaning I was trying to draw the strokes very loosely vs writing with control. Katakana, however, was flowing. I still found I wrote larger, but the strokes were closer to the image chart.

I will attach here the first attempts at both.